Red Faction: Armageddon Review

By Ned Jordan

It’s been half a century since the events of Red Faction: Guerilla, and while
Mars is free of the tyranny of the EDF things are far from peaceful on the Red
Planet. A maniacal self-styled messiah and his band of cultists have destroyed
the terraformers that were keeping the surface inhabitable. Forced underground,
the citizens of Mars are still far from safe. The grandson of Alec Mason,
Darius, is hired to do some freelance demolition work, only to find that he’s
really been tricked into unleashing an alien horde on the caverns the Mars
colonists now call home. Darius must fight the alien multitudes and find a way
to both end the menace and clear his name, and then there’s that megalomaniac
and his army to deal with…

The move underground means a move away from the open world gameplay of Red
Faction: Guerrilla, and as a big fan of Guerilla I wasn’t thrilled when I first
learned that Armageddon would be a linear, event-driven game. I won’t let my
pining for the open red skies of Mars and the thrill of raiding an EDF compound
on a whim cloud my opinion of Armageddon, though. If you loved Guerilla and
can’t get past the fact that Armageddon is not open world, then you’re not going
to let yourself enjoy this game and should probably pass on it. I let go, and it
would be a shame if you didn’t, because on its own Armageddon is an enjoyable
shooter and a lot of fun.

The open world may be gone, but the destruction at the core of the previous
Red Faction is still here. You can’t blow holes in the rock – the game’s linear
nature can’t allow you to take shortcuts between the tunnels and caverns – but
there are plenty of structures built within the caverns of Mars that can be
leveled, as well as some destructible natural elements like crystals and
stalactites. The great physics engine that drives all of this destruction is
still firing on all cylinders, but your motivation for tearing down buildings is
different this time around. Outside of the occasional objective that calls for
the demolition of “infested buildings”, the destruction of buildings is more the
result of collateral damage from your battle with the aliens. That and providing
ammo for your magnet gun.

The magnet gun is one of those simple ideas that’s so much fun that you
wonder why no one thought of it sooner. Fire the gun at something and then fire
it again at something else, and that first something will go flying into the
second. If the first is the wall of a building and the second a spot on the
ground near a cluster of aliens, the debris will come crashing down on their
little party. If the first is an alien and the second the ceiling of a vaulted
cavern, well, if the impact into the rock doesn’t squish the alien, the fall
back to the floor surely will. It doesn’t take much imagination to realize that
the magnet gun can be used to eradicate aliens in imaginative ways. Not only is
it a lot of fun to use and play around with, the magnet gun is the gun that
never runs out of ammo. I kept it in one of my four weapon slots the whole time
I played the game, much in the same way as a I did with the hammer in Guerilla
(which is now the maul and sadly is relatively useless in Armageddon).

So you’ve just gone wild with the magnet gun and destroyed a bridge crossing
a chasm. Linear game, no alternate route, you’re out of luck, right? Wrong!
Thanks to the Nano Forge anything that’s been destroyed can be rebuilt. The Nano
Forge is a handy device strapped to your wrist that has a number of uses, one of
which is a repair power. Face whatever it is you want rebuilt and press the left
bumper and the Nano Forge will reconstruct the structure out of thin air. It’s
not only useful for those times when you destroy the bridge or staircase that
you needed to take; it can also be used as a magnet gun ammo generator. Send a
wall flying at an alien, rebuild it, and then send it flying again at another
alien. It’s also useful when you find your cover being blown to bits by alien
plasma balls – quickly repair it between barrages and then get your head down
again.

The Nano Forge has more tricks up its sleeve than repair. It comes
equipped with a force field push that can clear a crowd of aliens trying to
block your way, and it can be upgraded further during the course of the game to
include a stasis field that will keep enemies helplessly suspended in the air
for a short time and a shield dome that protects you from projectiles while
attacking anything foolish enough to enter your dome with a nanite swarm.
Basically it can make you a Jedi without the need to spend all of that time at
an academy or backwater swamp planet.

The game has a whole arsenal of additional weapons in addition to these and
the old standbys (assault rifle, dual pistols, rocket launcher,...). The
nano rifle fires nanites into its target, eating it up from within. The
plasma beam fires a beam of hot plasma that can burn through both structures and
aliens. The singularity cannon hits its target with a small black hole
that at first sucks everything around it into the singularity and then explodes.
There's no shortage of interesting weapons in the game and you'll enjoy trying
each new one out when you get your hands on it. Some are more for fun than
practical when you're caught in a mob of aliens, and I eventually settled on a
rotation of six that I'd swap out to suit the current mission. One of the
four I always had on hand was the magnet gun, though.

There will be times in the campaign in which you'll have the chance to don a
mech-like exoskeleton or drive a vehicle. The destructive powers of their
weapons combined with the protection that they provide make them a blast to use,
and I wish that there was more opportunity to do so during the game. Most
of the vehicle segments are contained towards the end of the game, too, and it
would have made things more enjoyable if they were spread out a bit more.
The midsection of the campaign feels a little long since its constrained to the
tunnels and caverns, which naturally begin to feel like more of the same after
you've been trudging through them for a couple of hours. I had fun with
the campaign overall, but I certainly did feel like the way out of the caverns
was a little too long in coming.

Another way in which Armageddon departs from its predecessor is on the
multiplayer side of things. There's no competitive multiplayer in the
game, which is very disappointing because the multiplayer in Guerilla was so
much fun. In its place there are two modes - Ruin and Infestation.
Ruin mode is a sandbox mode of sorts in which you get to play around with the
game's destruction engine. There are a number of levels filled with
structures and devoid of enemies in which you can just go wild bringing
everything down. Ruin mode can also be played in a timed version in which
you're scored based on the amount of damage that you can unleash before a timer
expires. Causing chain reactions and destroying things in quick succession
will reward you with a bonus multiplier and a time extension. When the
timer expires your final result is tallied up and uploaded to a leaderboard so
that you can compare your destructive prowess to that of others. There's a
certain amount of strategy required for Ruin mode in that your choice of weapons
is important (rate of fire vs. destructive firepower) and in the order in which
you attack the structures and where you hit them to achieve maximum destruction
in minimum time. Ruin mode is fun, especially when you challenge yourself
to move a few spots up the leaderboard, but it's the kind of thing that can only
be taken in short doses and there will probably be a point where the novelty
eventually wears off.

Infestation mode is the game's answer to all of those co-op zombie games and
modes that have been cropping up in shooters the last few years. This one
is zombie-free, though, and features hordes of aliens that must be kept at bay
by a team of one to four players. Each level has a set number of aliens
that are unleashed in waves, and killing them all without losing your entire
team in the process unlocks the next, harder level. If a player dies, he
or she will have to wait for another player for revival, and if no one shows up
in time the player will bleed out and have to watch the rest of the level from
the sidelines. In addition, if a player bleeds out three times, then he or
she is out for the rest of the game. There's another variant in the mode
which has the team protecting a structure from alien assault with the ability to
repair it during battle. This variant keeps the players focused on a
single area rather than giving them free reign to track down the current alien
incursion. Infestation mode can be fun when the players are willing to
work together - there's no quicker way to "game over" than to be stuck on a team
with a bunch of lone wolves - but like Ruin mode it's not something that you can
keep playing for hours on end. You're spending the whole time shooting
aliens over and over again in rather claustrophobic levels. I think it
would have helped the multiplayer's longevity to have at least one mode that
combined the building destruction of Ruin mode with the teamwork and enemy
hordes of Infestation mode, but as it stands you'll want to get the game
primarily for the single player campaign knowing that you'll just be getting
some short term diversion out of the other modes.

Final Rating:
87%. Armageddon is not quite as much fun as
Guerilla, but its arsenal, particularly the magnet gun, and destructible
environments make it an enjoyable game on its own.